African-American Philosophy: Health Care Ethics

The most prominent strand of moral thought in the African philosophical tradition is relational and cohesive, roughly demanding that we enter into community with each other. Familiar is the view that being a real person means sharing a way of life with others, perhaps even in their fate. What does such a communal ethic prescribe for the coronavirus pandemic? Might it forbid one from social distancing, at least away from intimates? Or would it entail that social distancing is wrong to (...) some degree, although morally permissible on balance? Or could it mean that social distancing is not wrong to any degree and could, under certain circumstances, be the right way to commune? In this article, I defend the latter view. I argue that, given an independently attractive understanding of how to value communal relationship, distancing oneself from others when necessary to protect them from serious incapacitation or harm can come at no cost to right action. However, I also discuss cases in which social distancing would evince a lack of good character, despite being the right thing to do. (shrink)

In this article I aim to make progress towards the philosophical goal of ascertaining what, if anything, all mental illnesses have in common, attempting to unify a large sub-set of them that have a relational or interpersonal dimension. One major claim is that, if we want a promising theory of mental illness, we must go beyond the dominant western accounts of mental illness/health, which focus on traits intrinsic to a person such as pain/pleasure, lethargy/liveliness, fragmentation/integration, and falsehood/authenticity. A second major (...) claim is that the relational facets of mental illness are plausibly understood theoretically in terms of a person’s inability to identify with others or to exhibit solidarity with them, relational values that are salient in the African philosophical tradition. I show that these two extrinsic properties well explain several intuitive instances of mental illness, including, amongst several others, being abusive, psychopathic, narcissistic, histrionic, paranoid, and phobic. (shrink)

English-speaking research on morally right decisions in a healthcare context over the past three decades has been dominated by two major perspectives, namely, the Four Principles, of which the principle of respect for autonomy has been most salient, and the ethic of care, often presented as a rival to not only a focus on autonomy but also a reliance on principles more generally. In my contribution, I present a novel ethic applicable to bioethics, particularly as it concerns human procreation, that (...) I argue is a promising alternative to these two approaches. According to this new moral theory, an act is right just insofar as it treats people’s capacity to commune with respect, where communing is a matter of identifying with others and exhibiting solidarity with them. This ethic is inspired by relational ideals of communion and harmony from the African philosophical tradition, but is shown to be attractive to a broad, indeed global, audience, with regard to its implications for the morality of reproduction. (shrink)

Henry Richardson has recently published the first book ever devoted to ancillary care obligations, which roughly concern what medical researchers are morally required to provide to participants beyond what safety requires. In it Richardson notes that he has presented the ‘only fully elaborated view out there’ on this topic, which he calls the ‘partial-entrustment model’. In this article, I provide a new theory of ancillary care obligations, one that is grounded on ideals of communion salient in the African philosophical tradition (...) and is intended to rival and surpass Richardson’s model, which is a function of Western considerations of autonomy. I argue that the relational approach of the former has several virtues in comparison to the basic individualism of the latter. (shrink)

Reprint of a chapter initially published in _Bioethical Insights into Values and Policy: Climate Change and Health_ (2016).